WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?! SOME PEOPLE NEVER LEARN #1

By: Kurt Amacker
Date: Friday, April 21, 2006

I love to heckle. Nothing warms my cockles more than sitting down with a bunch of friends and a b-movie and ripping someone's cinematic effort to shreds. Some call me cruel, but I'm funniest when I'm burning a bad movie and defiling the ashes. Hence, I read WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?! SOME PEOPLE NEVER LEARN with great interest, as it takes the same approach to a group of Golden and Silver Age stories by replacing the original dialogue will all manner of tomfoolery, courtesy of Keith Giffen, Andrew Cosby, and a stable of Boom! mainstays. The artists are some poor guys from comics' bygone ages that never knew their work would turn into a gag, but whatever. Most of them aren't even named, so you won't feel bad laughing at the artwork. It's probably just some guy buried in an unmarked pauper's grave after losing the rights to all of his work and turning to the bottle, so it's not really a huge deal.

The stories are standard, old-time pulp material. A space hero crashes a ship piloted by the Axis Powers, but Giffen rewrites it as a bunch of aliens trying to dump their trash on Earth. Cosby rewrites the story of a science fiction author and his son as that of a time-traveling tyke gone back to make George Lucas write the prequel trilogy again. Chris Ward rewrites the story of a young man transported to medieval times by a hypnotist as that of a jive-talkin' whitey obsessed with showing off his bowtie to the girls in the room. Like MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000, some of the jokes fall flat. Sometimes the jokes come easy. If you've ever wanted to see Hitler ask someone to pull his finger, this is your book. However, as a narrative exercise, it's interesting to see a story entirely rewritten with the same images and entirely different dialogue. That doesn't make WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?! high art, but then again, neither is getting drunk and yelling at PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE, and I've done that.

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